Purging Old Data

Rationale

The built-in implementation of the persistence API for relational databases never deletes saved data from your database. When users "delete" data from the UI, it marks the data as deleted in the database, and then ignores such data. This is done to increase safety, enable auditing, and allow an admin to "undelete" data that has been deleted by mistake.

While there are benefits to keeping data marked as deleted, there are cases where you might want to get rid of it, for instance to comply with regulatory requirements, or for larger systems to save space and improve performance.

This is done in 2 steps, starting by removing form data, and then the corresponding attachments. We recommend you follow the steps below only if you are familiar with SQL. Also, especially if you are going to run this on a production database, we highly recommend you first create a backup of that database.

Removing form data

The following statement is for Oracle (if you're using another database, replace ADD_MONTHS(SYSDATE, -1) by an equivalent function on that database). It will return the data marked for deletion more than 1 month ago. If you want to delete that data, replace SELECT * by DELETE in the statement, and run it again.

Removing form attachments

Next, we want to remove "orphan" attachments. Those are attachments no longer referenced by an existing document. As in the previous step, first check the data returned by the following query, and make sure this is data you want to delete. If that is the case, replace SELECT * by DELETE and run that statement again.